First off, I find it interesting that their slogan is “America First”. They seem to imply that we need to move beyond politics and come together to solve America’s problems. I completely agree with this. However, It is hard to take seriously when almost every speech given is partisan. Lieberman gives this speech where he invokes Washington’s warnings about political parties and partisanship right after Fred Thompson spent 25 minutes referring to “the other side” is derogatory terms.

Apparently the Republican Party this year has forgotten the meaning of the word “irony”. They mock the term “change” and claim Obama is using it as a political tool, then they go and nominate Palin as a political tool and co-opt the “change” message for themselves. How do they represent change when they both agree with pretty much everything Bush has done? Palin even more so than McCain. At least McCain believes in stem cell research and evolution.

The Republican Party has made such an issue out of Obama’s relative lack of experience and then they go and nominate Palin who is far less experienced than Obama to be next in line behind a 72 year old who has had 4 bouts with cancer. I guess inexperience only matters if you are on “the other side”.

Last night Giuliani comes out and has the gall to call the Dems the party of Big Brother. Wasn’t it the republicans who trampled on the Constitution and allowed our government to spy on its own citizens without warrants? Isn’t it the Republicans who tried to force libraries to give them lists of people and what books they check out? Wasn’t it the Republicans who forced the telecom companies to hand over phone records of U.S. citizens? I am going to send Rudy a dictionary with “irony” highlighted.

The Huckabee comes out and says, “”Maybe the most dangerous threat of an Obama presidency is that he would continue to give madmen the benefit of the doubt. If he’s wrong just once, we will pay a heavy price.” I would like him to qualify that statement. Has Obama not made it perfectly clear he would aggressively hunt terrorists? If he is referring to Saddam, i think it is abundantly clear that invading that country has trained a whole new generation of jihadists, who may not have hit us yet, but will. Just as the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan trained a whole generation who would hit us 11 years later.

But this really was what the convention was all about. It was a worn out page from Karl Rove’s playbook. Scare Americans. Make them believe that voting for a democrat if going to bring ruin and destruction upon us all. I heard absolutely no substance on what they would actually do (which by the way is what they slam Obama for). All I heard was the same thing Bush has been doing for 8 years and they claim to be about change. They basically talked about the same old trickle down theory. Well guess what? 8 years of trickle down hasn’t worked. We have had modest growth in the economy but wages have remained flat. From what I have read, the same thing happened in the 80’s when Reagan tried it. They also talked about a hands off approach to business. Well look what happend in the mortgage market when you leave companies completely to regulate themselves.

They talked about “winning” the war in Iraq when at the same time the Iraqi government is saying they want us out. They are a party who shits all over our American values by saying, for the first time in our history, that it is okay to invade a sovereign nation because they may at some point in the future be a threat to you.

The only change I see mentioned is brushing off partisan politics, but they say this out one side of the mouth while saying out the other side that the Dems will bring ruin upon America.

And Americans are generally afraid so this will work again as it did in 2004. It will be a close race where enough people are scared to try something new and go with the same strategy of giving everything to the top tier and hope they will be generous enough to let it trickle down to the rest of us in the form of good wages and health-care instead of keeping it in bonuses and stockholder dividends. We will continue to take an aggressive stance with our friends and rule through intimidation and fear and create ever more enemies around the world. We will continue to see people die of treatable diseases because Republican ideology assumes if you don’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps then you deserve to die. We will continue to have an America where it is okay to discriminate against gays and Muslims. And hopefully McCain won’t lose his temper and get us involved in yet another war.